Have women always been likened to cats on a tear or is it just me? The movie version of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help seems to take the serious issues of inequality among the races and put them into the context of a cat fight – or at least some seem to think so. Having read the book, I find that I don’t particularly want to see the movie. Fact is, there are varying degrees of selfishness within us all that can contribute to our being kind or our being mean – and although barriers to true civil rights have largely been lawfully put down, the meanness is in the loopholes. Times are more selfish now than they ever have been, as the loopholes threaten to overcome the laws. Wait, I said threaten? I think they’ve already been overcome. I also think this wasn’t what the civil rights workers had in mind when they were singing that song.

Back to women – I’m not sure if another tale of Caribou Barbie was supposed to be in the making when a journalist asked me for permission to use this picture I took when I passed through Wasilla last summer:

…but if a Wasillan-on-the-street piece on the all-too-present Sarah Palin was supposed to be in the making, well, I responded too late for the picture to be used, and I found I was kind of glad about it. And I’m not glad because I am suddenly going all-in for hunting from helicopters and making speeches only Dadaist bebop jazz poets could snap their fingers in appreciation for, but because I am tired of women in power and/or grasping at power being so stupid that I cannot support them. I had a friend in college who once expressed a need for there to be an old-girl network in the art world, which is still a pretty damned sexist arena, in order to help us all break some glass ceilings. Well, the art world is very much the entire world, and I am still torn between the ever-present need for that old-girl network and the need to shake these idiotic women silly and try to impart to them how much they will be on the wrong side of history if this keeps up…but hey, we’re living in times where nobody thinks that far ahead. We don’t even think that far behind.

Which brings me to a fairly womanly thing that I never ever thought I’d feel – the longing to have my son back on a day-to-day basis again. This is the first time he’s been away from us longer than ten days, and it’ll be good to have him back from his Grand Grandparent Tour of 2011. Tomorrow he returns, and until he does something like spill the first glass of milk he pours – oh, hell, even then, I’ll be happy to have him back. Part of my recent crazy times have simply been born of this feeling of someone missing, of a vital role having been snatched away for a time, and it’s something I thought would never happen to me. Perhaps it’s a form of parental Stockholm syndrome, I tend to think in my darker moments, but then explain to me why a nice young man sidled up to me at a bar recently and, when he asked me what I do, I answered that I raise my son? I am a mom. It’s true what the ubiquitous “they” say: once a mom, always a mom. A new school year is ahead, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that the little guy is nearing his ninth year on the planet. Can’t believe we all got this far without more than a hairline fracture, a sliced-open cranium, an ADHD diagnosis, and my particular neuroses. I still find it amazing that any human beings grow to adulthood.

I am also finding that there are no loopholes to true parenting – because if I knew what true parenting was, I’d box it up and sell it for beaucoup bucks. Sure, some things can be gleaned from books and from the experiences of others, but the practices are all one’s own. Practice well, everybody.

Med Check, Addiction Check

It's official, dammit. After months of being so ticked off at AT&T we couldn't see straight, figuring we could manage just fine with Verizon cell phones as our home numbers and the free wifi we were getting in our house anyhow, and then coming home from a two-week vacation in mid-July to discover that the wifi was no more, I'm here to say that my name is Leigh and I am highly dependent on the internet.

Oh, I have been denying this fact for some time now, but I had to face how truly upset I was when I had an antidepressant check today and turned into a blubbering mess. It's compounded by having to face another year in which I anticipate tussles over the little guy's consumption of medication to keep his ADHD in check, but it also cannot be denied that the internet has also become an essential tool in his schooling. My husband seems to be content to bum the wifi from coffee shops when he isn't working in the office, but I'm finding I cannot do that. It's everything I can do to write this post at the library, even...hence the strange paradox that's consuming me: I know, deep down, that once one is on the internet, the computer being used is not a form of one-way glass, but I don't feel comfortable using it for long periods of time anyplace but my own house.

It's a weird feeling that I'm hoping will be remedied by our finally biting the bullet and getting the services of Cox Communications, but my spouse wants to see how much blood he can squeeze out of the pounds of monetary flesh we will have to give them before we get started with them. Anybody got a line on cheap cable modems?

ANYway, this is to say that I did have a marvelous vacation despite my current distress...and I am, once again, assisting in the planning for this year's Rising Tide Conference, which promises to be a good one. Give the graphic below a click to check what we've got going this year for programming:



If you're too lazy to click on it, then perhaps telling you that David Simon, creator of Homicide: Life On The Streets, The Wire, and Treme will be there, as will Tulane professor and local geographer extraordinaire Richard Campanella, might get you to do something. The food panel this year promises to be a doozy...in fact, I'm finding that I don't want to miss a thing this year. You know you want to check it out. You know you do. And don't gimme that line that this is only a bloggers thing, because it isn't. I would LOVE to see you all there.

Seriously, until I can satisfy my internet jones, getting more people registered will have to suffice. Make this crazy Jewish mother happy and go for it.

This one's been in my head a lot lately:



Getting back to blogging soon. Promise.

Soul That Snapped Her Control

I had made up my mind. Anybody who could steal a band out from under one of my favorite soul singers, make an album with that band that sold millions of copies, and walk away with an armful of Grammys was someone to be detested. She didn't deserve to have farted on the couch next to the ratty-looking orange chair Sharon Jones had sat in as a queen sits on her throne on the cover of Naturally, her second album with the Dap-Kings. This jazz impostor's song about avoiding getting off drugs and alcohol was everywhere to boot, compounding things by being just a little too catchy.

So, that was that. I couldn't stand Amy Winehouse and I would never never buy one of her albums.

Well, I keep learning to never say never. A reissue of Winehouse's first album, Frank, was out, and I was curious, especially when I learned that a version of "Moody's Mood For Love" was on there. Made famous by King Pleasure, it's a mid-fifties quasi-scat masterpiece that is a challenge for any singer, and, aside from the idiotic arrangement she had to sing over, I had to admit that her vocal treatment of it was pretty damned good, even if Winehouse was a skinny-yet-curvy Jewish broad whose hair was bigger than she was. I also had to admit that her style and her attitude were hooking me...especially that partly scornful/partly celebratory shout-out to all the Victoria Beckham-wannabes and north London bar-hopping tarts, "F___ Me Pumps." The trouble with Frank wasn't the woman's voice, though - it was trying to back it up. Her style and quality was at times much older than she was, and the instrumentals didn't always complement her.

Maybe it was the assistance of a different producer and co-songwriter. Maybe it was the backing band that had the chops to not only complement that voice, but boost its vulnerability into the stratosphere. Maybe it was one too many nights boozing, fighting with boyfriends (especially that one who became her husband for a time), and listening to the Shangri-Las. Whatever it was, it became Back To Black, a whirlwind of Ronnie Spector plus Anita O'Day, with a chaser of Janis Joplin for good measure, and Winehouse was no longer just some Brit jazz singer, but a tattooed, beehived international star. She was also drinking quite heavily and greedily from the cup of life, inhabiting the bad girl persona with every inch of her increasingly rail-thin self. In this day and age of any and all news traveling instantly through the internet, everyone who cared to follow, and even those who didn't, could vicariously ooh and aah over her "authenticity" while tsk-ing over the excess of it, and with that, some sort of sick die was cast that I, for one, hoped the stronger side of her would be able to bust wide open. Having never been an addict, myself, I failed to get that she needed much, much more than inner strength to get through her troubles, especially because the eyes of the public seemed trained on her every move. These past few years or so, it seemed she was taking the time to get it together, and then she had a disastrous appearance in Belgrade, followed some time later by being found dead in her flat.

Just because you can see something coming like this for someone like Amy doesn't make it any less sad. What makes it infuriating, however, is when you see her death reported by a blogger concerned with Jewish issues and the comments include attacks on the life she led (which, well, everybody had done many times over already) and saying that, because of all her tattoos, she couldn't have a Jewish burial anyhow. She sported a "Daddy's Girl" on her left arm that kinda stereotypically screamed "Jewish princess," so I think a Jewish burial could've come about on the basis of that alone, but I bristled at the automatic condemnation on the basis of what was on her outside. Amy Winehouse had a supportive family, friends, and great talent, chose a terrible path, and seemed to be working her way out of it when she passed away, but the commenter forgot that even in the Tanakh, there are bad girls who aren't all bad. He also forgot that the ceremonies surrounding the burial for the dead are just as much for the living. It heartened me to learn that even though she was cremated, there was a Jewish service for her. It wasn't all about glorification of this flawed human being, it was an acknowledgment of her humanity: that she was beloved to some despite the choices she'd made.

At any rate, I look at her performances and wish she hadn't joined any damned club of the young, famous dead. I wish the peace for her had been longer-lasting, that she could have survived whatever losing game she put herself through. But that's past and gone, fading away, leaving nothing but her voice and the impression that a little girl got very, very lost.

A traveling frame of mind has overtaken me, as it tends to do this time of year. Hey, between our extended families living in faraway places and Dan's need to stay in all 50 states at some point in his lifetime, we travel. And though in coming weeks, we will be headed to points west, I'm tickled by the news that a bunch of diamondback terrapins tied up JFK airport runway traffic. Although I woulda loved to have heard what the pilot had to say to his passengers on the American flight that got stuck for a bit while turtles in heat were herded off the tarmac, the closest we have to that is a listen at what air traffic controllers there had to deal with:



If those terrapins are headed for Brooklyn, I hope they avoid the heavily polluted Gowanus Canal.

Of course, Dan comes back from his latest trip to NYC with some stuff from one of his favorite bargain stores, and, for the first time, I took a good look at the shopping bag and wondered...how long has Century 21 had that slogan?

See, thing is, their flagship store in lower Manhattan is right around the corner from the site of the world's most infamous terrorist attack. Are we really in Afghanistan to fight for those bargains? According to Century 21 department stores, we are.

And finally, though I will be out and about for a while, I will have something to look forward to once I return - a certain conference that's being held on August 27th at Xavier University this year.  The registration fee will be increasing to $30 tomorrow from $25, though, so it'd be best to sign up for it today, while you're reading this. Head here to sign up for Rising Tide VI at the reduced rate. I would love to see you there.

"What are you doing about it?" Dad asked when I told him about the recent Louisiana Science Education Act repeal attempts rearing up only to get smacked down. "So you think this is awful and stupid, which it is. So what are you doing about it?"

Well, yeah, I wrote about it. But I knew he wanted to know how much further it could be taken. And gosh, I would love to see it here. Get the ears and the funds of a few like-minded, moneyed influence brokers and beat the Benjamins about the heads and shoulders of those affiliated with the Louisiana Family Forum until they voted these "alternative" teachings down - a neat, short-term political gaming solution to this problem that will most likely resurface in this state because it's easier to legislate this stuff into existence than it is to, say, work on a real plan for curing what ails this state economically. Heaven forbid there should be lasting, earthly, rational change coming from the Louisiana lege that actually serves the constituents.

Recent reading has me wondering if this is in no small part dictated by a viewpoint that still endures in one form or another from down the centuries - a viewpoint that we still can't fully shake.

It was a credulous age (the early nineteenth century). One reason people were so quick to believe in the Murrell excitement was that they were eager to believe in anything, no matter how strange, as long as it was bad news. They were particularly fascinated by occult portents of doom. Everybody knew that owls and whip-poor-wills were evil omens, that a dog howling in the night meant somebody was about to die, that prudent people had to carry a tuft of wool tied with thread at all times to prevent being ridden by witches. It was a time of seances and mirror divination and spirit rapping - an era when, as Melville observed in Moby-Dick, "the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city."

Having also just studied a parasha of the Torah this past weekend that once again presents the mixed multitude that came out of Egypt as being a whiny bunch ready to believe the worst, I have to contend with this aspect of human nature that also tends to nip our better inclinations in the bud. Or, if there are indeed  better inclinations, they are fairly misinformed, misdirected, and downright patronizing ones meant to impose one's will on another rather than actually seeing to what is needed.

It's kind of what burns me up about HB580, which is up for vote in the state Senate today, having already been approved by the state House. Introduced by the same legislator who was also responsible for the Louisiana Science Education Act, HB580 enables local school boards to buy textbooks not approved by the state - a bill that, if approved, can make it easier for individual parishes to introduce the "supplemental materials" in biology classes that the LSEA allows. So hey, state-sanctioned pseudo-science could have money spent on it, but the funds for, say, remediating a temporary school site while the school building itself is being worked on are supposedly not there. I foresee that, for Louisiana public education's next trick, they will solve the problem of badly needed school facilities and renovations by telling the kids to pray for them.

For now, we do have the recourse of telling the state senators not to vote for HB580. Email links and further contact info can be found here. But after that...

...where do we go from here?

Well, the parents of my son's school have kind of gotten what they wanted.  Emphasize "kind of":

After failed attempts to arrive at an acceptable mitigation plan with the LA Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ), the Orleans Parish School Board announced today that it will postpone its Audubon Charter renovation project until further notice.  

Audubon Charter was scheduled for a two-year comprehensive renovation at its Broadway school in accordance with the School Facilities Master Plan. In order to accommodate the school, the School Board had arranged for a replacement site, known as a swing site, in the Lower Garden District on the block bounded by Richard, Constance, Orange and Annunciation Streets.  

The Annunciation site was selected after an exhaustive search for space in the Uptown area. Because of soil contamination that was previously mitigated at nearby Annunciation playground, the School Board ordered soil samples as part of its due diligence. When that study indicated significant levels of lead in the soil, the Board took steps to outline a mitigation plan, developed by noted scientist, Dr. C. Paul Lo, who has experience in the area. Following a meeting of Audubon parents on May 25, concerned parents contacted LDEQ, which in turn called for meetings and communication that resulted in suspension of the project.  

School Board President Lourdes Moran said student safety is her highest priority. “Unfortunately, LDEQ’s recommendation would not allow the charter operator to meet its projected August opening. Therefore, it made the project impossible to begin at this time. The School Board will review its process for all projects scheduled for Orleans Parish. We will continue to identify a suitable location that is safe for our school children.”  

More info can be found here. The fur - and the lead - was flying over this back in late May. It was of course going to come to this, but bathrooms and facilities still in dire need of work are preferable to lead.

What I am now wondering is when nearby districts will start doing this:

From the Washington Independent:

A school board in Virginia has voted unanimously to leave No Child Left Behind, which would mean joining a bevy of other boards across the country in sending a resolution to Sec. of Education Arne Duncan asking for the request. 

The petition is a joint effort by The American Association of School Administrators and the National School Boards Association to “urge—absent Congressional reauthorization—immediate regulatory relief for the 2011-12 school year, and any efforts to rescind or modify current regulations and alleviate undue pressure on the nation’s schools.” 

The letter continues: 

We urge the Department of Education to exercise their regulatory authority to relieve school districts from the constraints of current statutes, keeping schools from being held hostage while Congress moves forward with complete reauthorization. We request that this relief be straight regulatory relief, not waivers. Schools deserve straight regulatory relief, and not the additional requirements or conditions that often come with waivers. We specifically support suspension of additional sanctions under current AYP requirements, effective for the 2011-12 school year. (Schools currently facing sanctions would remain frozen; no new schools would be labeled as ‘In Need of Improvement’ or subject to new or additional sanctions.)
Over 900 school districts have signed onto the proposal

900 is a lot. 

The joint effort by associations which represent school boards and school administrators is not insignificant. The massive number of school districts which have opted out of No Child Left Behind dwarfs the eight state level education heads whom want the strict guidelines maintained to support their own reform efforts.

It's too late for this for the New Orleans schools, I fear. We're too frazzled from trying to maintain what we already have. It's unfortunately up to all of these other drops in the bucket of NCLB mutiny to fill the bucket and douse the standardized testing that has run amuck in public education. Best we can do as parents is keep fighting it and not to let it overwhelm us and our children.

Time flies when family is concerned. It seems to do so more now than when I was a kid in my parents' house yearning to be free of the obligatory visits, the cards, the gifts, the constant remembrances that hold families together in these times when - more often than not - extended members live farther away from each other like never before.

I deeply, almost desperately wanted a sibling when I was younger, in part because most of the other kids I knew in school had one. I somehow felt I would be less alone if I had a brother, but, when telling people my mom was going to have a brother didn't seem to hurry it along, I managed to let go of the idea until I was fourteen and Mom said, "Guess what?"

My teenaged mind then rolled its eyes and thought, "Great timing."

I felt by then that I had to hold back on voicing a lot of smartassed thoughts, as my strategy until I was out of my parents' house was to keep my head down and my nose clean and then my chances of getting what I wanted would be greater. I did make it clear, however, that I wasn't going to be the default babysitter for my brother. It's a decision my parents mostly complied with, and one that I now regret that they did to a certain extent. Then again, dealing with a formerly colicky infant who was then in the midst of being potty-trained while I was looking at colleges wasn't on my list of things I thought I should be handling.

It became even clearer as the years passed that my parents were raising another only child. It wasn't just the age difference that made this so - I'd grown up in a Texas metropolis, and my brother came of age in small-town Pennsylvania due to my dad's job-related moves. I didn't really play catch with my brother until he was near the end of his high-school days. Friends of his jeered at him for telling the truth about his big sister. "Oh, yeah? A sister?? Where IS she, then?" The most I could do at this distance was chat with him occasionally across the phone lines, see him occasionally at family gatherings, listen sympathetically to Mom when she told me about one or another of his escapades, not all of them benign.

But when it came to my brother's college graduation, I knew I was going to be there, even if it involved piling into a rented Suburban with most of my extended family and heading to upstate New York to sort out hotel rooms for ten-plus. It threatened to rain the day of the ceremony, but it managed to hold off until after all the graduates had walked through the central memorial on campus, as per commencement tradition, and had their names called to accept their degrees. Journalist/anchor Judy Woodruff gave the address, correctly stating that graduates probably won't remember her or recall much of what she said - hell, my family remembers much more than I do about my college graduation (it kinda helped that this guy gave our student address).

Perhaps it was her particular perspective on my brother's generation and its challenges. Or the injections of reality into her address that told the class of 2011 they would likely fail at some points in their lives, and, in considering the current economy and job market, the class members would probably have to move back home for a while. Or it was my brother asking me about a potential job in Metairie, then dismissing it when I told him biking to work in the Causeway-Veterans Blvd. area could be a dicey proposition. Maybe it was my enjoying a beer at a bar with him for the first time...but I started to worry some about the future for my brother. I still worry about it, to a certain extent.

Having my head in the interwebs, my kid in school, and my self in a city struggling to keep its dirty existence alive and well has probably sensitized me more to the fact that, more even than demonstrable ability and undeniable skills, a certain selfish cunning, desperation, and dumb luck is needed to get by in the world today - and I don't know how well we're training these future generations in those realities. The best any of us can really hope for is that, when that learning comes, it won't crush our kids too badly. Ideals like my brother wanting to bike to work may fall, and there will be compromise. It may even eat away at many, many souls...but that is life in all its insane glory.

How well equipped are any of us for all of this, when all is said and done? We won't know until those bridges will have to be crossed somehow. What I wish for my brother is that he do all of it with style and grace and with not a little of the chutzpah in his genes. Goodness knows there's a great deal of it: I learned a few things about my dad this past weekend that make me wonder even more how he could've survived his wild days. The door's always open to him down here, no matter what he decides to do.

This little brother of mine's come a ways in his twenty-three years. Here's to the beginning of his long adult road.

I'm a tired broad who has fallen full-on into the Twittersphere since the past couple of early-week posts here.  It's too easy now that I have a smartphone. Throw in the mad dash to clean the house before the in-laws arrived atop the work being done on our house at the same time and I've got lots of things rolling 'round my head that I sorta threw about in Twitter shorthand.

I missed it this week, but I've been taking pictures of the Natchez pier Mississippi River gauge at the edge of the Quarter and posting them on Twitter as "This week's edition of The River Is Too Damn High" in partial homage to this movement and also because the river IS too damn high. My father-in-law understands the phenomenon of drought while a river rises from his visits as a kid to summertime Hannibal, Missouri, further upriver, but it really is something to experience. My Twitter pal and local blogger E.J. has taken the RITDH theme and run with it as a campaign manager for my run for the governor's office. There will be levees around every house, a Flood Deduct Box to steal...er, centralize contributions to the effort, "priority boarding for campaign contributors on all future rooftop helicopter rescues," (credit E.J. with that one) and we will get together to tell the higher ground all the way up in Yankee Minnesota where it can shove all this extra water in an action I call the Billion Gallon March. We are currently amending the platform to address the heat by proposing a temperate dome over Louisiana, which is a pretty insular state to begin with, so why not make it a physical reality? Wow, what else is Too Damn High? Let me know, citizens.

As a consequence of the heat and the stupidity, too many children are dying in locked cars in this heat. One is certainly too many, but that number is actually rising. I was afraid to even let the little guy in the car for a few seconds while I went to return the shopping cart to the bin in the grocery store parking lot. Take your kids inside with you when you gotta go places with them in this heat, or make arrangements for them to be indoors with a responsible sitter if you can't take 'em with you someplace. This goes for pets, too. In all seriousness, it's dangerously hot.

And finally, Karran Harper-Royal has been tweeting from the Orleans Parish School Board teacher firings trial in civil district court for the past few weeks and is wondering why in hell the mainstream media is not covering this. Don't start with the possible reasons, just check her Twitter stream and go look at the website for the trial for further updates. Why is this trial important?:

After Hurricane Katrina, the Defendants (local and state education officials) took arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable actions in the aftermath of a national disaster to enact legislation that abrogated the plaintiffs’ employment rights and “property rights.” Political newcomers to the OPSB used Hurricane Katrina as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to carry out an old political agenda to abolish the New Orleans Public School System as it existed before Hurricane Katrina, and replace it with quasi-private, Charter Schools, using public funds. 

Effective November 30, 2005, the Louisiana Legislature passed a law known as “Act 35” which resulted in the State takeover of 107 public schools in New Orleans---with the publicly stated intent to authorize national Charter School operators to take over these schools. Of the 50 State-controlled public schools which reopened nearly a year after Hurricane Katrina, 31 became Charter Schools and 18 were operated by a new State-controlled agency called the “Recovery School District.” It was no surprise that State education officials also refused to allow even tenured pre-Katrina NOPS employees to transfer to the 18 state-run public schools.  They seized an inopportune time…a tragedy…to advance their political agendas.

The combined actions of the local and state education boards threatened the economic and personal survival of 7,500 public school employees and their families. The establishment of 31 quasi-private, publicly funded Charter Schools threatened the future of a public education system in New Orleans. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, these employees enjoyed a property right in their employment guaranteed to them under Louisiana’s Constitution and several State statutes. The storm took their homes but local and state education officials took their jobs.  

...Court documents and testimony show that 88 of the 120 NOPS schools met or exceeded their state-required School Performance Score (SPS) for the 2004-05 School Year (just prior to Hurricane Katrina) but this fact has not been reported in the media. Nor has it been reported that immediately after the storm, Louisiana State Department of Education officials changed the definition of an acceptable School Performance Score from “60” to “88” which allowed the takeover of 107 NOPS schools---- leaving the local school board with only five (5) schools post-Katrina.

Keep checking it out and spread the word. This trial is simply another way in which state and local governments seem to want our tax dollars to be spent. I don't know about you, but I don't want my money to be going towards endless idiotic fights in court over these asinine decisions that hurt too many people. Do we really elect our legislators on this basis? If so, stop the world, I wanna get off...or maybe I'll amend the gubernatorial platform to include a Trial Costs Are Too Damn High tenet.

So, lately The Gambit's Twitter account hasn't exactly been the bearer of good news...among its latest tidbits of legislators behaving badly came this one from last week:

BREAKING: @RepealtheLSEA fails by 1-5 vote of state education committee. Sole vote to repeal: Yvonne Dorsey, D-Baton Rouge.

...followed by this insult to that injury:

LSEA: "All of you have been able to get out of high school despite this 'terrible' law." - Rep. Julie Quinn, R-Metairie, voting no on repeal

Well, at least we know who doesn't believe the children are our future.

The Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), for those not in the know, can be found here.  It is an intriguing and craftily creative exercise in how to allow creationism to be taught alongside the theory of evolution in public elementary and secondary schools in Louisiana without explicitly mentioning the word "creationism". If there is anything in this act that could possibly work in the favor of keeping the supplemental teachings of the C-word out of the science classes, it is this self-referential Section D caveat within:

This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.

...but saying that only that section is not promoting any religion or any discriminatory practice gets us into the realm of "It depends on what your definition of 'is' is."

This piece of garbage was signed into law by our governor nearly three years ago. One of the immediate reactions to Bobby Jindal's signature on it was for organizations such as the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology to take their conventions elsewhere, kicking New Orleans' recovery in the teeth in the process. And now it seems the only thing that will peel this complete nonsense back will be many, many expensive days in court that we as a state cannot afford, all because the Louisiana Family Forum, in concert with the Discovery Institute, has successfully imposed its values on the rest of us poor schmos.

What is the Louisiana Family Forum, and how were things allowed to get this far? Well, let's let Lamar tell you. They showed the lege the money through exploiting some non-profit organizational loopholes themselves, and now we have the LSEA. It'd be a perverse thing of beauty if it weren't wielded in the service of such stunning ignorance. It is in an atmosphere such as this when sometimes, a child shall and must lead.

Enter Zack Kopplin and his campaign to repeal the LSEA. It begins with the following:

While the misnamed and misguided Louisiana Science Education Act claims to promote critical thinking in schools, it is really stealth legislation worded in a way that attempts to dodge the Supreme Court rulings against teaching creationism (and its offshoot intelligent design) in the public school science class.  Louisiana’s kids deserve the best education possible, and should be taught proper and truthful science rather than religion in their science classes.  We need to be taught real science in order be successful in today’s global economy.

If that weren't enough for most people -and it apparently isn't - the reasons why such an act is wrong are in this post, and it snowballs from there, to the point where Kopplin is ready to up the ante despite being "stunned at the way (Rep. Julie Quinn) attacked the other kids (at the State Education Committee Hearing). We had about 30 kids, and she went after them."

To borrow a few pages from the Christian bible the LFF, Livingston Parish, and Louisiana legislators like Quinn seem to revere so, too many hearts have been hardened like Pharaoh's in the course of this mess. What plagues will be brought upon us as a result? Am I the only one who thinks the continued ignorance of the average Louisiana public school student is a pretty damned big one that isn't worth all of this grief?  Not to mention all the money that will be poured down the drain should the defense of this act ever enter the courts...

Louisiana legislators: let our children go.

Cross-posted at Humid City

Even though I own a copy of it, I've been reluctant to watch Who Does She Think She Is? in large part because I've lived large portions of what the artists in the documentary have gone through. I still see myself and my ongoing struggles in any book or essay, any film, any set of statistics documenting how damned difficult it still is in this country - indeed, in this world - to be a mother and to be an artist of any kind. I don't care who you are: if you are a mother, you still have to choose. Societal pressures dictate this. If you are not a slave on a pedestal in your own home as a mother, then you are a selfish bitch unworthy of your family. Okay, the extremes might not be there on a relationship-by-relationship basis, but the overall tendencies are there.

I have known this deep, deep down...but I don't think my husband really got it until the documentary cropped up on PBS Sunday night when we were channel-surfing and it was really the only thing on. His knee-jerk reaction when he sees my face light up at the mere mention of artists who are women, God love him, is "You should go back to your glassworking," which is what he said when we discovered Who Does She Think She Is? was on. We watched it after Dan put the little guy to bed, however, and both of us grew quiet, me because I was struggling with my feelings over what I knew was going to be said...but all Dan said, at long last once it was over, was that he was headed to bed.

I'm finding myself afraid to ask him what he really thought about it all.

Most of the women in the documentary ended up divorced, with one of them, artist Maye Torres, recounting her struggles over custody of her children once her presumed life partner decided he didn't want to be with her anymore. Her response, after discovering that no one in town would really help her with her custody battles, was to do her damnedest to become such a good artist that there would be no question in people's minds that that was what she was meant to do, therefore putting obstacles in her way as a mother could be seen in a different light. Artist Janis Wunderlich, one of the ones in the documentary who is still married, has to shoe-horn making her art in-between shuttling her five kids around and doing cooking and cleaning, and then she doesn't even get a chance to really take in the clay work she does once it's finished for fear of one of her children breaking it. Can you say recipe for exhaustion? 

These are the "options" laid bare, my biggest fears about marriage and parenting screaming out of the TV, and the truth is, I don't have faith in Dan that he could weather any of the turmoil that would be guaranteed to come this way were I to take up glassworking again today. I've sacrificed too much, and he hasn't sacrificed much at all. I'm all too conscious of how much money would be spent and of how time would be changed around were I to try to construct a small furnace in our backyard or set up a table torch for flameworking. I'm too aware of the house and the cars not being in my name, too mindful of the ways in which school hours and 9-to-5 work hours don't meet up for me to trust him with things as basic as dropping off the little guy and picking him up from school, too afraid that his lip service to my return to glassworking will cause harsh, hurtful things to come out of his mouth when faced with the realities of going back to it again and managing a household with a kid. I guess one could argue that I am not blameless in this, and I'm not - I've enabled him to think it'll be sooo easy for me to just pick up where I left off when I found out I was pregnant, because he's still doing the things he did before we were married. He's still going to all of his band practices after work, still going to Torah study and services on Saturdays, leaving me home with my son, and when there's a night I want to do something and he's already got something planned, there are cringe-worthy gripes about how much a sitter costs when I can't get another mother-friend to look after the little guy. I'm not supposed to be a needy person and ask him to give all that up, am I?

I hate feeling this way, that asking the man I love to overcome a few millenia of patriarchy and face the realities of juggling the undervalued and overlooked roles of parenting and housework will blow up in my face and implode our family, but it's there.  I'll have to ask him about it one of these days, I'm sure, and the answers will probably reinforce the reasons why I'm still on antidepressant medication and why I'm still a big chicken about setting up some kind of studio in my back shed.

Sometimes, no matter how good documentaries are, they still suck.

It's a crazy dilemma, to be sure.

Yes, my son's school building is in dire need of the renovations that are planned to be going on for the next couple of years.  Yes, the kids can't be attending school in that same building with all that work going on.  Yes, I'm kinda happy that the proposed temporary site is much, much closer to where I live.

BUT...

...when lead levels in the ground of the temporary school site are found to be much, much higher than normal, what will the school district be doing about it?:

The school board plans to remediate the future playground area, but didn't test a much larger area where modular classrooms and the cafeteria will be located. There is no word yet on whether that area will be remediated, even though it wasn't tested.

"I feel very strongly that the school needs to step up and protect our children and do it transparently," said (Audubon student parent Melissa) Piñera.

But Lourdes Moran, the school board president whose grandchild attends Audubon Charter School, said parents shouldn't be concerned.

"I would not jeapardize (sic) my child, my grandchild, or anyone's child," said Moran. "It's just not within my personality to expose any child to a perilous situation. It's unfortunate that some parents might disagree."

Moran went on to say that the site, which is owned by the Orleans Parish School Board, was chosen because school officials were unable to find another location large enough for the classroom modulars needed to accommodate hundreds of children who attend Audubon Charter School.

"It is not our intent to make [parents] feel uncomfortable, but unfortunately we really have no options," said Moran. "We've gone so far as to discuss with the Recovery School District to give back a building that they're not using so we could use that as "swing space" and not have to spend this much capital in temporary modulars, but unfortunately they could not acommodate(sic) us. This is the only solution we had at hand."

Concerned parents started an online petition Monday asking that the entire area be remediated with new soil and concrete.

"We're just trying to urge them to really look at the site, face the facts about the lead levels there, and really, remediate the entire place," said Piñera.

Parents also say they've never been formally notified the school is relocating for the next two years.

There were no links to the petition to the OPSD in WWL's report, which can be found at this link.  Lead is in most places in the ground in this town, to be sure, but the city is taking steps to remediate public playgrounds.  For the OPSD to keep the school at this site, however, they need to start the mitigation process now, for the entire site.

Over 900 more signatures are needed.  Give it a read, at least.